Talk:The Last Stand/Armor/@comment-25171002-20160424203020
This has bugged me for awhile so I sat down today and tried to work out the formula that they use. What I've discovered, is that there's two distinct formulas in use. The first one I'm having problems nailing down exactly, but you can get a pretty good estimate of how strong armour under 150 is by the following formula: (armour / 100) / 0.026 = % reduction The 0.026 shifts around a tiny bit, with it growing slightly as you get over 100 armour and being a bit smaller closer to 1 armour. I had been trying to figure it out with a consistent formula which applies to the whole range of options, but it doesn't work for everything, and then I found out why once I started messing around with the necron lord's armour. Here's a few more interesting data points you can get with him: 200 armour = 60% reduction 275 armour = 75% reduction Combined with the others on the list on this page, what we find is... any armour value of >1.5 is calculated by the formula: (Armour + 100) / 5 (150 +100) / 5 = 50% reduction (it shows 49%, but anything past this is accurate) (200 +100) / 5 = 60% reduction (260 +100) / 5 = 72% reduction (275 +100) / 5 = 75% reduction (300 +100) / 5 = 80% reduction Normally I'd go through the effort of pinning down the exact formula for the sub-150 armour batch but... well, after seeing so simplistic of a hack job used for the higher end armour values, I really don't care anymore. It'd only make me beat my head against a wall in frustration. Normally armour in games that comes out to a % reduction value goes by the following formula because it's completely linear: (Armour * coefficient) / ((Armour * coefficient) +1) If you have a coefficient of 0.01 (or 1%), then 1 armour is worth +1% effective health. Have 300 armour, you essentially have 75% damage reduction, or you'd need 4 damage to deal 1 actual damage. It basically means that your effective health scales in a linear fashion but the mitigation % drops off over time so it looks to most people like a diminishing returns formula when it's really not. Such is the problem with dealing with -X% damage reduction, since as soon as you hit 100% reduction you take no damage. Now... I don't honestly know why they didn't use the standard formula since it would work consistently across the entire spectrum of armour values. A -100 flat armour reduction would essentially remove 100% of their bonus health and be of equal value no matter whether then enemy had 300 armour or 100. You would simply deal +100 flat damage more for every 100 damage you dealt before you reduced their armour, so it'd be consistently more valuable. If they had -60% armour reduction, then you'd go from dealing 40 damage a hit to 80 per hit. If they'd have -75%, you'd go from 25 a hit to 50 per hit. This would've been an easy and effective way to handle armour. Instead... we get a mess. The effective bonus health at 150 armour is +96%, but the effective bonus health at 300 armour is +400%. Yeaaah, for 2x the armour you get 4x the effectiveness. This also means that until you get 150 armour, you really may as well not concern yourself with it because it doesn't really do enough to matter anyway. Additionally, it means that a -200 armour weapon is strangely more powerful at 300 armour than it is at 200 armour. If you drop someone from 300 armour to 200 you drop them 300% effective health, but if you drop them from 200 armour to 0, you only reduce their effective health by 250%. Now there's a possibility that they wanted higher end armour stripping to be more valuable, were a 200 penetration was more useful against higher armoured targets to make up for the fact that it wouldn't have as much effect against low armoured targets (if you had under 200 armour, you're losing value entirely), but given how the rest of the armour formula seems to work, I'm not really buying that explanation. It's giving them too much credit for a needlessly messy armour formula. The end point, is that the standard linear effective health formula should've been used and wasn't. I have no clue what this garbage is, but it's clunky and provides a very imprecise setup for game balance. Any game designer which saw this would be irritated because there's no consistent value for how powerful -100 armour reduction is which makes balancing armour and armour reduction a pain.